This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Abstract

We present a new human-computer interface that is based on decoding of attention through pupillometry. Our method builds on the recent finding that covert visual attention affects the pupillary light response: Your pupil constricts when you covertly (without looking at it) attend to a bright, compared to a dark, stimulus. In our method, participants covertly attend to one of several letters with oscillating brightness. Pupil size reflects the brightness of the selected letter, which allows us--with high accuracy and in real time--to determine which letter the participant intends to select. The performance of our method is comparable to the best covert-attention brain-computer interfaces to date, and has several advantages: no movement other than pupil-size change is required; no physical contact is required (i.e. no electrodes); it is easy to use; and it is reliable. Potential applications include: communication with totally locked-in patients, training of sustained attention, and ultra-secure password input.

Author Comment

This is a manuscript in preparation that will be submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed journal.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Sebastiaan Mathôt conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Jean-Baptiste Melmi conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Human Ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

The study was conducted with approval of the ethics committee of Aix-Marseille Université (Ref.: 2014-12-03-09), and conformed to the Declaration of Helsinki.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

https://github.com/smathot/mind-writing-pupil

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement n° 622738 awarded to Sebastiaan Mathôt. In addition, this research was funded by a VIDI Grant 452-13-008 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to Stefan Van der Stigchel. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Add your feedback

Before adding feedback, consider if it can be asked as a question instead, and if so then use the Question tab. Pointing out typos is fine, but authors are encouraged to accept only substantially helpful feedback.

Follow this preprint for updates

"Following" is like subscribing to any updates related to a preprint.
These updates will appear in your home dashboard each time you visit PeerJ.

You can also choose to receive updates via daily or weekly email digests.
If you are following multiple preprints then we will send you
no more than one email per day or week based on your preferences.

Note: You are now also subscribed to the subject areas of this preprint
and will receive updates in the daily or weekly email digests if turned on.
You can add specific subject areas through your profile settings.